


The Arc of Ascension, Saga 11: A Little Bit Stranger, A Little Bit Better, A Little Bit Worse

by bzarcher, solarbird



Series: Of Gods and Monsters [56]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Accidents, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Background Femslash, Background Relationships, Canon Lesbian Character, Canon Lesbian Relationship, Coincidences, Drinking, EcoPoint, F/F, F/M, Gen, Grieving, Guilt, Minor Character Death, Mistakes, Multi, Post-Talon, Post-Talon Widowmaker | Amélie Lacroix, Remorse, Self-Recrimination, Strategy & Tactics, Talon Angela "Mercy" Ziegler, Talon Emily (Overwatch), Talon Lena "Tracer" Oxton, Tragedy, Wakes & Funerals, Wrong Place and Wrong Time, backsliding, omnium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 09:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16015193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bzarcher/pseuds/bzarcher, https://archiveofourown.org/users/solarbird/pseuds/solarbird
Summary: The new gods have risen, ready to grapple with a world of heroes. Moira O'Deorain herself has been reborn, now made one of the creations her previous self meant to rule, and she works with her wife - the goddess Mercy - and their ensemble of new deities to remake the world, toimproveit... for everyone.The fragile peace is truly tested for the first time, by an agent outside either side's control - and as a result, Mei-Ling Zhou finds the weight of the world squarely on her shoulders.Of Gods and Monsters: The Arc of Ascensionis a continuance ofOf Gods and Monsters: The Arc of CreationandThe Armourer and the Living Weapon. It will be told in a series of eddas, sagas, interludes, fragments, texts, and cantos, all of which serve their individual purposes. To follow it as it appears,please subscribe to the series.





	The Arc of Ascension, Saga 11: A Little Bit Stranger, A Little Bit Better, A Little Bit Worse

Fareeha frowned at the intelligence reports as she spread them across her desk. 

“This is stranger than I expected.” 

Sombra gave a humorless laugh as she leaned back in the office’s guest chair. “Pretty sure the Russians would agree.” 

“The omnium’s used full frontal attacks before, but never over such a wide area.” She pulled up a map, the holographic projection springing to life. “Historically it tends to use probing attacks from several directions, usually trying to catch the Russians napping. But this... this goes everywhere.” She drew a finger from the omnium’s position to the battlefront, and then beyond. "It's as though it wants to draw as much fire as possible."

Sombra frowned as she sat up. “That’s weird."

"And extremely inefficient, if it wants to gain territory. An omnium can be many things, but not that."

"Therefore," the hacker mused, "it wants something else."

"Indeed," nodded the Huntress. "But whatever that might be, it's not something we can detect. Perhaps you could try to ask?"

Sombra stood, already turning over possibilities as she headed for the door. “I’m on it, _raptora_. I’ll see if I can get it to tell me what it's doing - and slow it down, maybe, even if I can’t stop it.”

_C'mon, Koschei, what're you up to?_ she thought, heading down the stairs. _We're so much closer now... don't screw this up._

\-----

Dr. Shào poked with tongs at the sample collector's latest collection of debris and contaminants collected along the northern curve of the China Sea Ecopoint's primary perimetre. Plastics, mostly, as usual, but a first scan of a penaeid shrimp showed an unusual and interesting spectrum of heavier metals - a few, mildly radioactive.

He waved over to his assistant, Rén, who brought the cargo sled over from where she'd been taking water samples and environmental condition scans. "Found something interesting, doctor?"

"Perhaps." He handed Rén the shrimp, along with a few samples of plants, and a dead anchovy, surprisingly untouched. "We'll bring these back with us for deeper analysis."

"Right!" Rén nodded, carefully taking the samples, and putting them into individual sample cases, already marked with the collector's identification number.

"If this shows what I suspect it will, then next week, we'll come out here and move this ring further north," the doctor said, putting away his tongs. "I think we've found the edge of the old North Korean dumping site."

" _That_ will not be fun work."

"No. But at least it's well understood." He tapped a short sequence into the long-range ultra-low-frequency transmitter on his suit, triggering a "collection complete, returning home" signal back to the Ecopoint. "I am also not looking forward to two compression/decompression cycles in so few days. I am too old for this sort of nonsense."

Through the mask, he could see Rén's grin. "You're not done yet, doc."

"You won't say that when you're my age."

"C'mon, hook onto the sled, we'll be back in time for dinner. I'll even buy the beer."

Dr. Shào just snorted - the commissary had many things, but beer was not one of them - and snapped the carbonier line to the sled's safety bar. Hanging on to the drag grips as the sled started moving, he nodded to Rén, who gunned the motor, and the sled drove itself forward, pulling the two divers with it.

They'd made about 1500 metres when Dr. Shào heard a low, but powerful sound, almost like grinding, but different, through the water.

"Do you hear a... rumble?"

"Yeah," Rén said, pointing just ahead to a shimmering movement in the seabed. "And, uh... what's that?"

\-----

Dr. Zhou looked up from her flow analysis as the emergency signal bells rang, and she ran upstairs as the bell continued to ring, checking dome status as she ran.

_All dome systems normal_ , she thought, as she ran into the main operations room. 

"Whetu, what's going on?" she asked, as the operations manager gestured, wait.

"We need someone out there _right now_ ," she said, her English especially clipped, as it tended to be under stress. " _Right now_. Do you hear me?"

"The relief team is in motion, but they can only pressure up so quickly!" came the reply.

Whetu snarled a little in frustration, then hit comms again. "We're picking up _no_ telemetry. Get them out there as soon as physically possible."

"Acknowledged."

Mei-Ling watched as Whetu launched a pair of camera drones, operations crew taking over piloting as soon as they departed the base.

"What is it?"

"Remote alarm, followed by total signal loss. Shào and Rén."

"No one else is out?" asked Dr. Zhou.

"No. Dr. Shào's team was the last. They were _supposed_ to be back already. That's why the relief team had started depressurisation."

Mei-Ling closed her eyes, for a moment, and shuddered. "What happened?"

"We don't know. We got a seismic report, then an emergency signal from Rén, and then a suit failure alarm... now, nothing."

"Seismic? I didn't feel anything. How far away are they?"

"Five minutes by sled. We think. Whatever it was, it was small. Maybe a small tremblor, but it didn't sound like one."

Mei felt herself go into a detached, emergency mode, and pulled a copy of the data over to her working padd. "Has this data been sent to seismology?"

"Automatically."

"I'll make sure they see it. Is there _anything_ else strange?"

Whetu rocked her hands back and forth. "Sonography saw a blip at the same time, but nothing identifiable. Could've been rockfall - camera drones will be there in five minutes, tops."

Mei-Ling nodded and stepped out into the hallway to alert seismology, who informed her they were already at work analysing the very small reading - it couldn't have been an earthquake, and almost seemed like a reading they would pick up back at the university when the high-speed trains ran by student gear.

_Or like the time they dug that new subway tunnel_ , she thought, looking at the graph again. _No... it's **exactly** like that._

She ran down the hall towards the seismology lab. _What are we seeing?!_

\-----

It took the cameras the expected five minutes to reach the site, to watch the tail end of the digging machine disappear back under the seabed.

It took the divers an additional ten minutes to reach the site, to find the mangled remains of Rén's body, and the barely conscious - and dying - Dr. Shào. "It came up, under us, from the sea floor," he managed. "I don't think they even knew we were..."

They almost, but not quite, got him back to the dome in time to save him. Five more minutes might've been enough, but those were five minutes they did not have.

It took only one glance at the video for Sombra to identify the digging machine as the type of unarmed semi-autonomous mining machine whose communication protocols she'd duplicated to talk to the AI, and only a few hours to find the tiny amounts of data picked up by her recording stations, reporting 'partner facility offline' back to Siberia, at 25.7hz. By the time she told Fareeha, the omnium's attacks in Russia had become even more energetic and unrelenting than before.

It took the Korean, Chinese, and Oasis militaries less than ten hours find the exhausted digging machine, which had bored straight down into the crust, destroying itself, and another thirty to ascertain that there were no other, similar digging machines under the nearby seafloor. The three governments and the ecopoint agreed in principle to expand their geological monitoring across the area the next day, effective immediately, exact details to be worked out over time.

That following evening, matters settled as well as they could be, the Ecopoint crew scheduled a memorial, and a wake, for their lost friends.

\-----

Mei-Ling Zhou hadn’t planned to get drunk.

She didn't even _want_ to be drunk. She’d been _so close_ to a full year sober. She’d worked so hard for it... put in all that effort... and now, it was for nothing.

Officially there wasn't even any alcohol kept in the Ecopoint - well, outside of necessary lab supplies, of course. As a working facility in a hazardous environment, it would have been incredibly irresponsible! Dr. Zhou emphasised this point in particular many, many times.

Unofficially, well, people kept all kinds of things in their personal effects, and rigging up a still was practically a right of passage in certain circles. 

When the staff had decided to hold a wake after the formal funeral services, it wasn’t a surprise when a variety of bottles and flasks began to be passed around.

At first she’d refused. She hadn’t really talked about her decision to stop drinking to the staff, so they’d mostly assumed she was trying to refrain out of duty. 

“No one here will report you,” they’d said, thinking of her university, or, perhaps, her government. “Please - one toast to their memories.”

_Just a toast,_ she finally agreed, _that's all._

Then a bottle of wine had been passed to her while they all shared some stories, and it would have been rude to turn it away. 

They’d been her friends, after all. Everyone had gotten along well with Shào, and Rén had had such a promising future ahead.

So she drank another toast to lost friends, then another, and another. Just like before. Just like afterward. Just like in Lijiang. At least it was “just” two this time, that's not so bad, right? Just two. Just two more lost, dead, friends, at another ecopoint, at another stupid, stupid, fucking ecopoint. Two more sacrificed in the name of trying to save the world, on _her call_ and it's working, and everybody.

still.

dies.

Mei wasn’t sure when she found herself having more than a couple. Couldn’t say when her tears had mingled with the alcohol, when a few more sips of wine became more than a few, and realising that her friends were trying to stop her, not give her more.

It took a couple of tries for her to realise that she’d been cut off, but eventually she did, and so, she decided to leave the wake.

Somehow managing to stand up, deciding she should go back to her quarters, should call Hanzo on the hard line installed there because right now, that seemed like a really good idea, and for the first time that night, her friends - her _surviving_ friends, at least, _so far_ \- all agreed, and a few even walked with her back to her quarters.

The door closed behind them after quiet, painfully heartfelt goodnights, and as she walked over to the phone, she found the little padd from the airport, the one Angela had pressed into her hands, pleading for her help. She hadn’t even opened it, she just kept bringing it along with her since all those months ago, and so Mei poked at it, because it was there, she was drunk, and maybe the distraction would help her feel a little less pathetic before she called her boyfriend. 

And maybe, just _maybe_ , remembering why she’d done all this would make her feel a little less empty and broken inside. 

She flipped through the many pages of the gods' proposal, so much of which had come true, and kept flipping, flipping, flipping, faster and faster, until she reached the end of the document, and it started over, at the beginning, at the parts she'd skipped over, because she didn't _need_ to be 'upgraded' to do this work, she didn't _need_ to be 'improved' to save the world, she didn't _need_ to be able to withstand pressure changes up to 100m without...

...depressurisation...

...cycles.

She read that again, and again, and again, and then she screamed, and smashed the tablet, hurling it across the room with a tremendously wet sob before getting some semblance of control over herself. She checked outside her door, found her friends had left her to her privacy as she'd asked, and walked along the corridor to the emergency evacuation teleporter bank, where she activated one - setting off a set of alarms - and vanished, to Oasis.

\-----

"Mei-Ling," Angela said, gently. "I'm..." She shook her head. "You're intoxicated, Mei. You're not... responsible, at the moment. I'm sorry. No."

"I don't care," Dr. Zhou replied earnestly, full of liquid conviction. "I know what I'm doing."

"Yes," Dr. Ziegler replied. "And so do I."

They'd handled the teleporter alarms, of course. So soon after the mining machine incident, all three governments remained on a state of heightened alert, and as soon as Dr. Zhou had materialized in the city, calls had been made, explanations gathered, and nerves soothed, the human way. _Dr. Zhou was very distraught_ , they’d explained, and it wasn’t even a lie. 

"If I'd been changed I could've saved them! If I'd just let you..."

"You don't know that, Mei. Even we don't."

"Yes," Mei snapped, "you do."

Angela closed her eyes, tightly, for a moment. "Mei. Someone... tempted you, didn't they? You don't have to hide it, it's obviously true. They did, enough times, and eventually, you said yes."

"So?"

"You _know_ we want you." The doctor opened her eyes again, so bronze, so bright. "And now _you're_ tempting _me_. Please. _Don't._ "

"C'mon, Mei," Lena said, interceding gently. "Let's sleep it off, yeh? Talk about it in the morning. We've got a guest room, back at our place."

"I won't change my mind," Mei-Ling said, firmly.

"Nobody's saying y'have to, luv. Just... let's see how y'feel in the morning, yeah?"

Mei-Ling looked over to Lena, her copper eyes somehow just a little bit softer.

"If you... okay. If you say so."

Lena smiled, warmly, and tabbed her comms. "Em, Danielle, it's Lena - are either of you near home? Could y'do me a favour?"

"Tell me what needs to be done," she heard her spider reply, "and I will do it."

"Hey, lover," she heard Emily say, in turn. "Just popped in for lunch myself. What'd you need?"

"Would one of you pull down the guest bed? Mei's gonna be visiting for the night."

\-----

Mei-Ling awoke, alone, in a largely unfamiliar place, her head pounding, her mouth fuzzy, her eyes dry. She moaned, a little, managing to turn her head, and saw the skyline of Oasis through a deeply tinted window.

_Oasis?! Am I... where ... how did I...?!_

But she didn't feel any different, other than the brutal hangover, which, really, was all too much the same as she'd known. She concentrated, or tried the best as she could, and managed to remember the wake, and the toasts...

_Oh, no,_ she thought, shame flooding her mind. _Oh, **no**._

She struggled upwards, and noticed the note on the end table, next to a glass of... what she presumed to be water, and a glass of something clearly not water, and a... nasal spray of some sort?

She read the note. She could tell it was Lena's terrible handwriting, even in Mandarin.

> Hiya, Mei! Hope the exclamation mark's not a bit too much for you this morning. *^_^*;; The water is just water, drink it, you'll need it. The green stuff is a fleet of electrolytes and some NSAIDs, the usual mix to help a hangover. And if you feel like trusting us, the nasal spray will sort you out right quick.
> 
> Hanzo's flying in, will be here soon. For now, I'm here - come out when you're ready, or just give us a shout. Whatever you're comfortable doing.
> 
> \-- Lena

_Well_ , she thought. _May as well._

She drank the water, which was water, and the electrolytes, which were electrolytes, and looked at the nasal spray, and decided she didn't even care what was in it. She pushed it into her left nostril and inhaled, pulling the injector, and...

"...Lena!" She shouted. "What is _in_ this?!"

She heard a laugh, and a door opened into a kitchen she'd seen before, and there Lena was, a huge smile and relief on her face. "The gods' own hangover cure, luv. Doin' better?"

"Yes!" she replied, astonished. "This is _amazing_."

"Goes pretty much straight to the brain and nervous system," Lena said, grinning. "Give the rest a few minutes, you'll even feel up for breakfast."

"I... haven't been changed. Have I?"

"No, luv, trust me - you'd know."

She thought about the previous night, carefully, noticing her clothes stacked neatly on a table by the opposite wall, as memories fell back into place. "But I... asked to be. Demanded to be."

"While seriously - brutally - pissed." No point in dancing around that.

Mei nodded. She remembered... surprisingly well, what had happened. Too well, in fact. All of it, until she went to sleep. "Are these memories real?"

Lena blinked, surprised. "What d'ya mean, luv?"

"I..." She scowled, hating herself for what she was about to say. "I know how it feels to be blackout drunk. I was. But I remember it... and I shouldn't."

"Ooooh," Tracer whispered, understanding. "It's part of the nasal spray. Bit of a memory booster - somethin' Ange came up with. But if you're remembering something, it's... 'cause you lived it."

She thought about that, then nodded, and looked back at the note. "Hanzo is coming?"

"Yeh. He'll be here in a couple more hours. I can leave you alone 'til he gets here, or take you to meet him at the airport, or..."

"But he's not here _yet_."

"No."

"So if I asked Angela to be changed now," Mei said, looking directly into Lena's copper eyes, "...would she say yes?"

Lena stopped, taken aback, and looked distressed before shaking her head. "Don't think so, luv. Not today. In a week... yeh, probably. But not now." She glanced down at the floor, thinking, and then back up. "Don't make her have t'say no again. Please? It was hard enough already."

Mei looked out at the city, through what she now realised was a darkened privacy screen, and bit her lower lip. "I won't."

"But... I have to say, if you're seriously thinkin' about it - y'should. You won't regret it. I swear."

_I know_ , the climatologist thought, as she sat, unsure sure what to say, until she realised something smelled genuinely delicious, and she put her hand to her suddenly salvating mouth. "Is that bacon?"

Lena perked up immediately. "And sausage!"

Mei looked back to the Weapon. "I am suddenly _very_ hungry."

"Brilliant!" Lena beamed. "I've got tea and beans and toast, too. Get dressed, already! I'll set y'up a plate."

Mei slowly started shuffing blankets aside, and edged her way towards the side of the bed. "Thank you, Lena."

"Breakfast's never a problem, luv. Best meal of the day, far as I'm concerned - 'specially if it's at 14:00!"

"I mean... for everything."

Lena paused for a moment, then winked, and aimed finger-pistols at her friend. "Save _that_... 'til y'come in." And she spun 'round towards the kitchen, as the door slid almost silently shut behind her.

_Maybe I will_ , she thought, as she rose from the bed, and began to dress herself.

They'd cleaned her clothes, of course. Who even knows what they'd smelled like.

_Maybe..._ she thought, wondering what day it even was, _maybe if I **was** a little bit better..._

_...I wouldn't be **this**._

**Author's Note:**

> This is the twenty-sixth instalment of _Of Gods and Monsters: The Arc of Ascension_. To follow this story, [subscribe to the series via this link](https://archiveofourown.org/series/972024), rather than to the individual works.


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